The Internet has become a powerful medium for storage and sharing of content. Many web-based services, such as photo-sharing sites, blogs, and social bookmarking sites, are available for users to store content and to share content with other users. The growth of these services have also led to the growth of “folksonomy,” in which users categorize content by assigning freely chosen keywords, tags, or labels to the content.
Folksonomy has some advantages, such as user freedom and its distributed nature. However, folksonomy also has some disadvantages. Because of the freedom of users to make up their own tags, there can be problems with users making up different tags for the same meaning and tags that may have multiple meanings. Furthermore, folksonomies tend to be unstructured. These disadvantages hinder efficient indexing and searching of tagged content by search engines.
Accordingly, there is a need for a more efficient manner of managing content tags.